Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/272

 divided for a while with men the female characters. But, during the life of Shakspeare, squeaking tongues and downy cheeks used to "boy" the greatness of his female parts.

We can understand how this custom must have helped both the audience and the actors through the frequently broad dialogue of the coarsest plays of that period, where things and situations are mentioned with a frankness and precision which cannot now possibly be reproduced, except in the sugar-coated fashion of the Offenbachian revival. Women wore masks when they attended the theatre, and needed not to be at the expense of blushing. The slight disguise lent to them the illusion of being neuters in the crowd. The world was then unsqueamish and forced no scruples on the playwrights, whose coarseness differed from Shakspeare's in being lugged in for its own sake. His plots always countenance his freedom and adopt it. There is Shakspearean motive for every wanton page, as there is, too, genius in it, which other writers could not ape nor rival. Each feeling is so essential to the intercourse of his characters that he cannot disguise it: it is a state of nature that gambols like a child among its elders, more likely to be smiled at than reproved. The texts of the poet's frankness survive, but not as deliberate outrages to the modern womanhood which would fain not speak nor hear them; and they do not justify the expurgated editions which unfix them from their natural connections with the chastity and married honor involved on every page and in the drift of every play.